Google Apps Legal Issues

Although it may seem like a simple push of a button to turn on certain Google Apps feature for your g.clemson account, it can be quite complicated.

The problem/issue we are running into with all these apps are the License Agreements. There are only certain applications that still fall under the License Agreement for our Google Apps for Education: Calendar, Drive, Gmail, Groups for Business, Sites, Mobile, and Talk. Nothing else. If we turn on any of the other applications we (Clemson University) not the actual end user have to agree to the new Terms of Service (TOS) for that individual application since the TOS are never presented to the user for the application.

So users would not be protected by the Google Apps for Education binding agreement with Clemson, and are subject to the Security and Privacy Policies of Google at large (which are vastly different than GAE) which could potentially violate FERPA regulations. Also many of these individual TOS have “indemnification” clauses in them that the university being a state agency cannot agree to, state agencies are not allow to indemnify others.

Another nagging issue is in general in some third parties, Google (in this case), mine the data in the accounts to create a better experience. The issue our legal department has had, is that we cannot allow users to do academic work in an unprotected cloud environment as academic work is also FERPA protected.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we simply cannot turn on other Google Apps at this time.